February 19, 2007

User generated content & Nature's experiment

The article I’m linking to explains how the scientific publication Nature trialled an open peer review process. They found that it was not well received by the academic community overall as only a few authors opted to take part in the open peer review process, and few substantial comments were made.

It’s interesting that Nature tried this process, and I note that they say that they “will continue to explore participative uses of the web.”

Perhaps we’re not ready for open peer review yet, but I look forward to finding more examples of user generated content within the academic community that will offer some quality assurance in a way that many user generated content does not.